


lost, but not forgotten

by orphan_account



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Character Study, Female My Unit | Byleth, Gen, minor dimitri/byleth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:34:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25945177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, crown prince of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus. Five years on the run.Plenty of time to lose his mind, and his humanity, too.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	lost, but not forgotten

**Author's Note:**

> can't believe i'm playing blue lions route for the second time in two months. what is my life anymore.  
> enjoy!! ♡

Dimitri's legacy begins long before his time, with the fabled hero Blaiddyd of the ten elites to the proud Loog of the blue lions, the founder of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus. However, the legacy he's _familiar_ with begins with his grandmother, Irina, the leader of the country two generations before him.

As a nation of warriors and knights, one that thrives off of winning battles in the midst of long winters, there was no honor higher than being a crest-bearer. The royal family did not shy away from letting women inherit the throne if they were worthy, and from everything Dimitri has read about the woman, Irina had been a fierce fighter in her own right, proudly deserving of the crown.

According to the old hired hands and their gossiping mouths, Queen Irina doted on her oldest child. Sometimes, it could take years for crest powers to manifest, and she'd held out hope that the boy would grow into its ascendency, but when he'd turned five, the intelligent woman braced herself for the undertaking of another pregnancy. Rufus had always been sweet, but the queen could tell, even from his young age, that he would never be the type of king that Faerghus needed.

When Lambert is born, joy rings through the castle halls. Irina is sweaty and tired after hours of labor, but the mark burns brightly on her youngest's breast; the crest of Blaiddyd disappears from the spot below her own ribcage, now transferred to the boy. The queen sighs with relief at the sight. Her husband does the same.

They've been holding their breath for six years. Now they can finally set back to business.

For a time, it is difficult for Irina to manage Rufus's temper. He isn't overly bitter towards Lambert, not as much as he could be, but he is still bratty and severe. The queen will have exactly none of that—she is raising _princes_ in her castle, not animals.

By the time Lambert is three, Rufus comes full-circle. Witnessing his brother's brute strength and steady gaze as a toddler shows Rufus that he could never bear to withhold such raw power. It scares him, sometimes, how very _aware_ the young Lambert is, his sky-blue eyes seeing straight through his older brother.

Thus, Rufus learns to respect their differences. He learns to distinguish himself in other ways, becoming well-spoken and even-keeled where his brother is sharp-edged and hungry, yearning to take Faerghus to ever-greater heights. Their mother dies young, on the battlefield where she is long-hailed for her glory. When Lambert assumes the throne, all of twenty-two years old, he wears the cape like he was born to do so.

Lambert's luck holds strong for many years, a star blazing bright as he cuts his path through rows of thorns. The king fights for reforms and new rights. As ever, Rufus is astonished by everything his younger brother accomplishes. Whenever the news comes from Fhirdiad to Itha, he cannot help but shake his head and smile, solemnly proud of everything the man has done.

When Lambert is thirty, his son is born, and he is beautiful, a crest-bearer like his father before him.

When the king is thirty-four, tragedy strikes Lambert for the first time, taking his wife away long before her time.

He is married again, the second wedding not as extravagant as the first, but Rufus is happy for Lambert all the same. Patricia is a beautiful woman, perhaps even more than his little brother's deceased wife, and she makes the king smile. In the aftermath of a plague, nobody could ask for anything more.

But then, of course, because the goddess has doomed the prince to a twisted and venomous fate, the king and queen are killed. Dimitri's father and stepmother are brutally murdered right before the boy's eyes.

Duscur is where Dimitri's legend begins, with his uncle assuming a throne he was never supposed to inherit because the rest of their family members are dead.

* * *

"Revenge," is what Dimitri cries out for from the very depths of his soul from the moment the flame emperor is unmasked, blood spilling hot over his cheeks as he cackles maniacally. " _Revenge_ ," he screams, the crunch of someone's ribs breaking under his boots as he marches forward.

The professor tries to stop him, but he's blind with emotion—the red of Edelgard's feather cape is the only thing that swims in his vision, the red of the blood dripping off of her axe; everything is _red, red, red._ She escapes in a flash of magic, thanks to Hubert, and Dimitri is left with the hollow anger festering inside of him, the tethers of his lingering humanity slipping out of his fingers.

From there, he fights through the siege at Garreg Mach. He watches helplessly as Professor Byleth careens off of the side of a cliff, never to be seen again. Dimitri's hand lies there outstretched, unable to save anyone, just like before, a sob spilling out of his throat.

It takes hundreds of people to take him down after hours of war, a dozen arrows in his legs and a spear run through his stomach. Dimitri spits at his attackers as they take him prisoner, the guards tying a blindfold over his face to keep him in confusion about his location.

In his cell, he broods, furious and raw. His keepers are just people following orders. He sees no sense in biting off their fingers and getting put in further isolationist confinement.

He mutters to the ghosts in his head to fill the silence, conversations with the dead becoming a solace as they days drift by into weeks. He's alive, but at what cost? His sanity is long gone now.

One fine day, perhaps a year after he's first brought to the cell, the emperor deigns to pay him a visit.

He almost doesn't hear her over the immediate snapping of his jaw. He breaks one of his shackles, bites the ear off of one woman trying to hold him down. He kills two members of Edelgard's retinue in his lust for her head, the ravings of a madman tumbling out of his mouth along with his spittle. "You'll be executed tomorrow," she says, calm and unaffected as ever, lilac eyes steady on his form as he writhes below the butt of a spear, blood pooling out of the fresh wound on his chest. "For the crime of killing your uncle."

Dimitri's blue eyes go wide for a moment, then his brow furrows anew. "How _clever_ ," he snidely remarks. "The mad prince losing the love of his people in his final hours by destroying his last living family member. Awfully convenient for you and your new rule of tyranny."

Edelgard's shoulders grow tense, but she does not rise to his challenge. When Dimitri makes a final lunge for her, Hubert hits the prince with a particularly ugly spell, the magic burning his skin until it bubbles. The blonde howls in response, curling in on himself with pain. "If we weren't using your death for publicity," the emperor's right hand heatedly whispers, "I would _destroy you_ for your insolence."

"Hubert," Edelgard murmurs, her tone brooking no further discussion. She lifts her head and marches out, Hubert shadowing her loyally, her shoulders held high as Dimitri barks out an endless stream of curses.

In the dead of night, the prison catches on fire.

And Dedue, who Dimitri has not seen in many, many moons, appears as his savior.

"I've come for you, my liege," he says. Dimitri sits there in awe as Dedue takes his place in the cell. The dark-skinned man uses a dagger to cut a swatch of Dimitri's unruly hair, tucking it into his breastplate. "Go now. You must live."

Dimitri is dragged into the woods, though he wants to stay, pushed along by dozens of dark faces and frenzied words in a language he recognizes but does not understand. He attempts to run back inside, to save his old friend before it's too late, but the flames lick ever-higher. Eventually, Dimitri finds himself seated by a stream with tears streaming down his face, all of them falling from his only functioning eye.

* * *

The war is hell for the citizens of Fòdlan, to say the least. Dimitri reads about his own death in the papers, his execution carried out by the renowned healer of old, Cornelia. The woman who once rid Faerghus of the plague, now lauded for killing the traitorous prince. "Foolish," Dimitri spits, trampling the paper below his boots, the dark metal of his armor growing black with mold.

He doesn't have time for pity anymore. What has such a thing gotten him?

Sympathy for his enemies is what kept him from reporting his suspicions to the professor all those months ago, when he found the dagger in the gardens at the officer's academy, hoping and praying that he'd been mistaken.

But no. Everywhere he roams, he finds sewer rats scrounging in the mud, lurking in the shadows.

 _Kill them_ , his father's voice says, a whisper that turns into a cacophony as Glenn and Patricia join in. _Kill them. Avenge us. Clean up this country until you fall apart, as your penance._

Dimitri comes from a long lineage of knights and warriors.

He has always been good at following orders.

He sinks his teeth into the skin of his enemies, blood dripping off of his jaw as he uses his bare hands to separate their heads from their bodies. The tendons are slick and pink as he steals a lance from the clutches of one of the soldiers, driving the blade through three men in one throw, all of them struck silent as they writhe on the ground begging for mercy.

"Mercy," Dimitri laughs, head thrown back as his eyes grow cold. "The emperor is the one who started this war, who would see this country drowned in blood. What say you of _mercy_?"

It starts with bandits and imperials, but as the rumors of his actions grow louder, he becomes something to be hunted for sport. _The one-eyed demon_ , they say, terrified as he looms over them, wearing naught but pieces of half-salvaged armor from corpses and the dyed-pelt of a bear he stole from a campsite several moons ago.

The crest of Blaiddyd is good for one thing and one thing only—enhancing his natural physique and bolstering his brawn, enabling Dimitri to escape covered in scars but alive, for the most part, skin blistered and purple with a wide range of bruises.

He lives off of the blessings of the land, throwing knives at rabbits and picking mushrooms off of the ground, barely bothering to cook anything. It all tastes like ash, anyways, and he sleeps with his lone eye half-open.

Four years pass like this, with the blood ever-present on Dimitri's clothes, the conversations with those he lost growing louder in his head. They are his only companions now, as he refuses to let anyone else come close. Those who try are removed quickly, as a bitter twist of fate has managed to bring the legendary lance _Areadbhar_ to be coupled with the owner of its crest.

It would take someone equally powerful to take him down. There are only two people he knows that would be suited to the task. The Alliance's Claude, who would kill him out of pity for what he's become, or the emperor, because he would haunt her throne for the rest of time otherwise, a constant threat to her agenda for total control.

Sometimes, when he is very thirsty, he looks at the flies swarming the bodies of all the people he's killed, and he licks his fingers clean, uncaring of the grime or unsanitary nature of what he's doing. The blood feels good on his tongue, a bit like swallowing a sword, something he hasn't yet tried, but he wouldn't surprised to add to his growing list of foul behaviors.

A boar. Felix had often called him such at the officer's academy.

 _Though one who's twice as vicious than any wild animal would be,_ his dead stepmother comments, her voice airy as it sweeps through his head.

* * *

He's half-delirious by the time the professor shows up at Garreg Mach, working off of one hour of sleep all week and ready to bite the fingers off of anyone living. A whole round of familiar faces turns up at the dilapidated monastery, people he once called friends, but his mouth moves more easily around the word _pawns_ now.

Felix looks at his prince like he's less than the dirt on his boots. Actually, there's something panicked in his eyes, not quite frightened but more...unnerved. Another lifetime ago, Dimitri would have been hurt by his revulsion.

Years ago, Dimitri would have _cared_. That he was making his best friend so upset, with his delusions.

But it's easier this way, the not-caring. Dimitri destroys every enemy that steps in their way, and brandishes his newfound barbarism like a medal on his non-existent sash. He wears no finery, not anymore, not since five years ago.

There's no need to keep a lid on his dark thoughts. As he digs his knees into Randolph's throat, winding him and sneering about how he's going to tear the commander's limbs off one at a time, he's _infuriated_ that the pleasure is taken from him, the shorter man's head rolling away in one fell swoop thanks to the professor's blade.

"Why did you do that?" He snarls.

Byleth clenches Dimitri's arm so tightly that the exiled prince almost winces. "You're being cruel for no reason. I couldn't abide that."

Dimitri clutches her up by the throat, a breath away from choking the woman to death. "Do not presume to _control_ me."

Without batting a lash, Byleth sends Dimitri crashing onto the pavement, eerily-green eyes glittering with pain and hot tears as she puts a palm around his throat in kind. "I would never. I merely ask that you pay other humans respect in their final moments. That's all."

Dimitri lets his arm fall with a scowl, balling his fists at his side.

Doesn't she know there's no point in reasoning with feral animals?

Don't they all?

 _They cannot see that you're too broken for this,_ his father, once a proud and noble king, looms over him, disappointment thick on his tongue. _Until that woman's head is in your hands, our hearts will never be at peace._

And so, Dimitri shrugs past her, shrugs past all of them, going back to his silent vigil in front of the pile of rubble in the chapel.

* * *

It's been a long time—more than five years—since Dimitri has felt anything more than the physical pain of weapons lodged in his skin, but.

Rodrigue's death feels like he's taken a sword to his kidney. It hurts, nearly as much as losing Glenn, Rodrigue's own son. The man had always been a guide for Dimitri, a light in the dark when his own father had gone on to his great reward so soon.

The loss is the first chink in his armor.

When the cloak of his anger begins to fall to pieces, his sole purpose for living throughout his exile comes into question.

He hadn't been worth saving from Fleche's dagger.

Not in the least. Not like the boy-prince he'd been in Duscur, or the future-king he'd been in the jails of Fhirdiad.

And still, Rodrigue had died for him.

"I hope you're happy," Felix says, and the strange part is, he's not bitter. Not nearly as much Dimitri would be, in his place. "This is what he always wanted to do, you know. To die in service to the crown."

Dimitri says nothing, because honestly, what else is there to say?

* * *

It doesn't become any _easier_ , afterwards. To make amends, with anyone.

Not with his companions, not with Felix, not with the professor.

 _Certainly_ not with the suffocatingly hopeful citizens of what was once the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, who have had their spirits lifted by news of the prince's unlikely survival. Of his plans to storm the Imperial capital and to kill the raging emperor of Adrestia.

But, he resolves himself to breaking the cycle of self-pity. If he's to be a king, in name more than anything else, he has to put on the act to the end. For the sake of what comes after the war, assuming he survives it.

The moons slip by, the passage of time as relentless as ever.

Dimitri finds himself at his usual haunt, again, but he is not alone.

"I'm sorry," he says, murmuring the words with his eye closed, because sometimes, when he opens it to look right at Byleth, he feels as though the guilt of his former actions washes up high enough to drown him. "The apology isn't enough, I know, but I owe you one, regardless."

"Given by the state of things," Byleth replies, "I'd say that you owe me ten more."

He barks out a laugh. "I suppose that's fair."

Silence sprawls between them, but it's not uncomfortable, necessarily—just odd. He hasn't spent this much time with anyone else since before, and the ghosts still haunt him, still whisper for Edelgard's head, but it's _different_ now.

Annoyingly, terrifyingly, he feels _bad_ for his enemy. She remains on the warpath with nary a friend to help her while she's down.

"Thank you." Dimitri opens his eye, lips moving up into a somber smile for the first time in years. "For saving me."

Byleth shakes her head. "You had to want to save yourself, first. I just stuck around while you got your shit together."

She is fierce and fearless and the worst opponent anyone could face on the battlefield.

Which is precisely why Dimitri's glad she's on his side in this war.

* * *

It's strange, he thinks, the amount of peace he feels standing at the throne of Enbarr.

He's waited for this moment for almost six years now, _dreamt_ of it, tasted her blood on his lips in dozens out of the hundreds he'd killed to get here, wondering if the emperor's blood would be sweeter, somehow, in his satisfaction, like honeyed wine.

Ironically, now that the opportunity to kill Edelgard is in his grasp, he no longer wants to.

"I want to work together," he says, and he means it. Astoundingly, he means it down to his core, and even the ghosts are quiet, cowed by the force of his will in accomplishing something beyond his own self-important wishes. "There has to be a better way."

He sees her move for the dagger and reacts with lightning-speed, his senses now well-tuned to threats of violence.

"A shame," he whispers, watching her crumple, the blade of the dagger having barely scraped his skin through all of his armor. "Truly, a shame." Dimitri turns to the professor after inhaling slowly, finding the courage to lift the dead emperor's body into his arms and display it to her troops, convincing them to yield.

* * *

There are still riots, of course, and bandits, in the aftermath. "Sometimes, I think things are better this way," Dimitri muses at night to the green-haired woman drafting up plans at the desk. "I am not a man built for peace."

"No," Byleth hums. "But, I think you'll learn to be one. Have patience."

His responding laugh comes out bitter and broken. "I've never known what it is, exactly, that you see in me."

Byleth pads over to the bed, running her thumb down his jaw. "Strength. So much strength that you don't know what to do with it." She pauses, taking a moment to stare off into the distance with a smile. "Just like me."

Dimitri snorts. "If I'd had a fragment of your ability to cope, we wouldn't be in quite so much of a mess."

"You'll figure it out," Byleth says. "These things take time."

* * *

The transition from crushing skulls to signing papers does not come easily to Dimitri, but he learns. He breaks quills, _dozens_ of them, until Felix convinces Annette to make the king a magic one, a writing utensil that won't crack under his inhuman grip no matter how many infuriating taxation agreements he has to get off of his desk.

And, he spars. Sometimes with Felix, Sylvain and Ingrid, sometimes with his fiancée. More often, he and Byleth go hunting, when he's feeling especially restless, gifting the excess meat to their retainers, graciously accepting the cured jerkies they receive in return, as repayment.

The business of ruling is tiresome, but it had been his destiny from the start, though he'd had a rather more rocky ascendancy than he thought he would have when he was young. But he's determined now, to be a just king, to be a _good_ king, like his father before him. To cut the ties of the crest system and the rotten nobility like Lambert wanted to so long ago, a mission renewed in his son, in a different era. In a different time.

People's opinions about things have changed, and Dedue, for one, will forever remain a supporter of the first king of unified Fòdlan in over a millennium, and of his ambitions.

 _Goddess, give me_ _strength_ , Dimitri prays, clutching Byleth against his chest in the dead of night as he tries to sleep, wanting nothing more than to be the man she sees in him, somewhere, past all of his dark depths.

When she shifts forward in their bed, throwing a leg over his, he grows soft and he warms, allowing himself this moment.

And every day, it gets a little bit easier, to lay the beast inside of his heart to rest for good.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for joining me on another dimitri adventure, ily all ♡♡
> 
> ♠[twitt](https://twitter.com/quillifer)  
> ♠[tumb](https://quillifer.tumblr.com/)


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